Thursday, July 06, 2006

On keeping a journal

I will be offline for the next 10 days, no email, no blogging...yikes!!:) I'm taking a trip, first to Milwaukee for a wedding, then a week with my hubby and kids, my parents, sister and her family at a cabin "up north" as they say here in Minnesota. Should be a fun time!

I was packing up my bag with books and such. Thinking about what kind of art I may want to do while I'm there. I picked up a book at work this week that they were withdrawing called Zara's Tales by Peter Beard. It's a wonderful scrapbook of "Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa". His memoir told as a tale to his daughter. I was thinking of altering it and making my own tales out of it. I *love* what he had to say here about his journals. I love the langauge he uses, the images he conjures up. Definitely going to journal my family adventure:)

"For years I'd been keeping journals, saving mixed-up scraps and clippings, dawdles and dipsy doodles, in daily diary layouts for the sheer pleasure of it, escapism: snapshots of buddies from school, snakes eating rats, rampaging rhinos, old photos worked on by the passage of time, bits of cloth, dry things, Captain Marvel and the Phantom, clipping from the Nairobi Standard, Picayune cigarettes, hog hairs, my hair, teeth and claws, run-over toads, fish scales, elephant tales, lizard tails, bits of bullets, bugs, twigs, seeds, plants, scorpion carcasses, snakeskin sheddings from lakeside lava rocks- all manner of minuscule jottings, scraps for a scrapbook- a homework assignment that nobody asked for. All glued down by the chronic scavenger. The pages would fill and fill and wrinkle in the gluing. It all meant nothing to anyone else but me, myself and I.""See" ya in a week!!

6 comments:

When I was around 14, my family went to stay for a week at a friend's cottage near Duluth. It's one of my favourite summer memories. We did a lot of boating, fishing, playing tunes on the piano and singing. The quintessential summer experience, in my book.